Thanks to Pete Lowry for spinning some rarities for me this week.

It's a good time to be listening to ideas and influences whist we write new stuff.

Pete played me some of the material from his unreleased archive and some TRIX albums from the 1970's.

Pete's got a major rep thanks to decades of recording and releasing Albums, he saw it as his duty to capture sounds by artists that were off the beaten track. It's been a life's work.

I spent some time reading the liner notes on the albums, thumbing through copies of 'Living Blues' with a '50c' price tag. It's a connection directly back to the masters.

We were fortunate to work with Millage Gilbert in Kansas City, connecting us back to Elmore James.  Pete has met and been photographed with both Pink Anderson and Floyd Counsel. Now that's a connection.

Yet, the moving hand moves on. It was good to take a refresher course and be reminded how much Blues mixes with other styles, how much of it was about your own style and finally, how much of the music was about the Dance.

Our 5D project shares some of the elements of field recording so I shared them with Pete, he was kind enough to listen.

Thanks Pete.

Fittingly, the day after, it was Studio time for final mixing on 5D. 

Last weekend we held a long band meeting to work through all the things we're up to. Last mix notes for 5D were pretty short.

At the session yesterday, Bill & Mr Wizard turned up at just the right moment to make some additional tweaks.

The final mixes are now circulating among the band and I am not expecting any further tweaks. We're at the point of diminishing returns.

That means we're done, right?

Um.

Err...

Well...

I'm still keen on getting the flamenco stuff into Brave With Your Heart - even worse, I was struck by a desire to hear Marina and her mates do a totally Flamenco cover version, complete with Spanish Lyrics and a reckless disregard for any melody or phrasing from our version.

I'd also be keen on getting a version of Manifesto by Dinesh Moylan down.

The door is open to the ideas and we set a deadline, the end of November. Whatever we get between now and then will be what we go with.

And finally - after quite some nerding about under the hood of my PC, I have managed to get Resolve 14 to a stable state.

Friend of the Band, now turned Bollywood Cinematographer, Mr D, has hipped me to Resolve for a while but I was all 'eh'. I tried it for the last few vids and I've come to like it a lot.

Whilst working through the idea's for the video component, I've tried a few things. I got stuck when running 8 layers of Mr Wizard. That will happen. Thanks to some googling and a few tweaks, I finally got it to run smoothly and started to cut last night.

Getting a second release out this year is on my mind, I'm working on it, it may take longer. We'll see over the next few weeks. The main pieces are straight forward, it's the connecting tissue that is now a question.

Bill & Mr Wizard did some brainstorming with me last night and Mr Wizard calls the 5D concept a 'meditation' and I reckon that's a great way to look at it. 

There are a raft of additional jobs that are attendant to getting this finished, might include more video recording, will definitely involve mastering and then after that we have to work out how to release it.

Oh yeah. We also finished the electric version of pirouette, which I plan on releasing as soon as I get final mix approval and mastering.

Sometimes it seems like nothing happens, then it happens all at once.

As Pete said the other day, as he was telling me stories of recording out in the South, 'Stuff Happens when you least expect it'.